Today, enterprises are looking to operate their information technology (IT) infrastructure in a safe and managed way while trying to reduce operating costs at the same time. One solution is to change from an on-premise software deployment to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, wherein parts of the information technology resources are outsourced to an external company. In that case, the complete IT infrastructure for a specific service is deployed by a service provider and only the service is consumed on demand by the enterprise. Typically, in the past, systems management tools and monitoring solutions have been deployed on-premise—i.e., in-house—as part of the IT operations tasks. However, monitoring solutions are now also provided as SaaS offerings. In this case, enterprise customers keep monitoring agents on their own systems, whereas a monitoring server is maintained and operated by an external company. Typically, such offerings rely on the fact that the Internet is always up and running. However, this may not always be the case. In times of an outage of the Internet, SaaS services may not be consumed any longer and monitoring solutions may no longer be able to monitor for proper operation of an IT infrastructure of an enterprise.
One solution to this dilemma may be to deploy an identical backup monitoring server on-premise of the enterprise which IT infrastructure needs to be monitored. However, in this case the cost advantages of deploying a monitoring system as a SaaS service are fading away.